Hon Hai Group Says It Plans to Raise Wages in Chinese Factories

After 11 attempted suicides in 2010 of Chinese factory workers at its Foxconn subsidiary facility in Southern China, officials at Hon Hai Group in Taiwan plan to increase worker salaries 20 percent. Exactly when these raises of workers who build products for Apple, HP, Dell, Sony and others will take place has not been announced.

In response to ever-increasing worker suicides,
Hon Hai Group, the owner of Foxconn, a technology and electronics manufacturing
supplier to the giants of technology including Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Sony,
Dell and others, announced plans to raise wages of its workers 20 percent,
according to Reuters. There have been 11 suicide attempts in 2010 at one
facility and several other attempts.

The Foxconn factory is located in the Shenzen province of Southern
China
and employs about 420,000 workers in this facility. Earlier this week, a worker ended his life by jumping
off the factory building, and another worker who tried to slit his wrists
survived.

"It may help the suicide situation because we workers just need money, and
the financial pressure on us is great," said a Foxconn employee surnamed
Wang, as told to Reuters.
"Every little bit helps."

Questions about U.S.-, Japanese- and European-based technology company
awareness of labor conditions have been raised amid the backlash of
these worker deaths by labor watch groups across the world. Apple, Dell, HP,
Microsoft, Sony, Nokia and others are facing criticism for using manufacturing
suppliers where conditions and pay would cause workers to take their own lives.

Workers in Chinese factories are dominated by work and the pressure to produce
high-quality products in rapid frequency with military-style precision,
according to labor watch groups like the Pittsburgh-based National Labor
Committee, which follows factory workers' plights in China and throughout the world.

"Twelve-hour shifts are common in tech and other factories, with the
workers usually getting one day off a week, on Sunday," Charles Kernaghan,
director of the National Labor Committee, told eWEEK. "OT is routinely
obligatory, and even if in some few cases it is not mandatory, the workers feel
compelled to put in the extra hours, since that is the only way they can
survive. No one could even come close to surviving on the legal minimum wage-and
here we are talking about living in primitive company dorms and eating hardly
edible institutional cafeteria food.

The young workers-and the vast majority of the workers are young-have a very
hard life. They really have no time to grow and develop," Kernaghan said. "They
don't have time to read or study, or to have personal experiences to develop
their emotions. All they do is work and sleep. These young workers are just an
appendage to the machines they work on. Each day is a combination of deadly
monotony and an exhausting race to meet the excessive production goals."

Reuters has also reported Hon Hai Group sent a letter to employees this week
trying to limit damages to injuries outside the workplace, which has been met
with much consternation among workers and labor groups. From Reuters:

"On Wednesday, workers said they had been asked to sign a letter from
Foxconn, including a clause saying the company would pay no more than the legal
minimum for injuries sustained outside the workplace. Confronted with the
letter, Gou [CEO of Hon Hai Group] apologized and said he was taking
it back, calling the language inappropriate."

Hon Hai Group has not said when it plans to implement the wage increases.